Japan is having a moment. Michelle Ogundehin considers what the West can learn from the country’s approach to design and culture.
For many in the English-speaking world – particularly those with an interest in design – no country holds greater enduring allure than Japan. It seems to embody a creative approach that regularly defies expectations.
Three of the last six Pritzker laureates (the Nobel Prize of the architecture profession) come from Japan. New Japanese fiction is all the rage at the moment; and many aesthetes got very over-excited by the long-awaited release of the latest Studio Ghibli film, The Boy and the Heron (studio founder Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement in 2013 before reversing his decision in order to work on it).
We are failing to fully understand the essence of Japanese culture and design
When we in the West try to decipher Japan we inevitably default to words like “contradiction” and “juxtaposition”. We cite the contrasts of the thrusting futurism of the Shinkansen trains versus most offices still using fax machines.
We wonder how Nintendo could have been founded in the historic city of the geisha, Kyoto, and why this most technologically advanced nation mars every townscape with a tangle of overhead wires because it does not bury electricity cables.
In so doing, we are failing to fully understand the essence of Japanese culture and design. After a month-long sojourn in the country, and much musing, I have come to the conclusion that the very inscrutability of Japan is in fact its point.
Rather than being anomalies, these paradoxes are the natural rhythm of Japan. In other words, it’s all entirely predictable – if you’re Japanese.
An upbeat orange fairy (pictured) as the mascot of the Tokyo police force? Why not. The sold-out exhibition that paired master craftspeople with Pokemon characters, held in a posh shopping mall? Of course. The disconnect between Japan’s seeming cultural introversion versus the blazing extroversion of its neon pachinko bars and gaudy karaoke parlours: hai!
Or consider the response of Yoshiyuki Tomino, the revered Japanese anime director, when interviewed by the Australian author Peter Carey. In a quest to uncover the deeper meaning behind his infamous Mobile Suit Gundam characters (20-metre-high child-powered robots fighting for freedom in an apocalyptic world), Carey dug for hidden meaning.
The very syntax and structure of the language insists on constant interpretation
It was nothing more than a ruse to sell toy robots, stated Tomino. But how can this be in the land of nuance?
My theory is that such a fantastically ambidextrous approach originates with the traditional script, kanji, based on Chinese characters, which found their way to Japan around the year 600. According to the journalist Willem Spelten in his book Hidden Japan, there are 2,136 standard-use kanji and Japanese children must learn them all alongside about 10,000 vocabulary words by the end of primary school. If not mastered by then, you can’t move up to middle school.
Everywhere you walk in Japan you are surrounded by these expressive strokes, utterly incomprehensible to foreigners. For the creatively minded, growing up in their midst must surely fire different synapses in the brain to those activated in the West. I’m currently learning Japanese, and the sheer illogicality (to my Western mind) of the strokes in reference to the sounds they represent forces me to abandon what I now see as an acutely culturally defined way of thinking.
Indeed, the very syntax and structure of the language insists on constant interpretation. Western rules of past and present, gender, singular or plural, and grammatical hierarchy, do not apply. Many words even have multiple meanings entirely dependent on their context, and a linear narrative structure is simply not the norm — which now makes sense of the many Japanese novels I’ve consumed since my return.
Take Butter, the bestselling Japanese book of the minute by Asako Yozuki. It has an almost incomprehensibly meandering plotline and determinedly bucks a satisfying denouement. Though gripping throughout, even as I turned the last page, I have no clue what really happened, let alone why.
Those revered Studio Ghibli films too, many people’s first foray into Japanese culture, frequently make narrative jumps that defy expectation. But then kabuki theatre, arguably the foundation of traditional Japanese storytelling, relies on exaggeration and dramatic leaps of logic.
Perhaps everything doesn’t have to conform to a prescribed notion of what’s appropriate
Regardless of this reality, Japanese design persists in the Western popular imagination as only a consistent haven of ordered minimalism, shoji screens, Zen simplicity, exquisite ceramics, teahouses, tatami mats and a single bonsai tree placed just so.
For sure it’s true that what distinguishes Japanese design and craft from that of other countries is precisely a respect for its centuries of ritual and tradition, but look a little closer and we see that in the hands of contemporary designers, it’s habitually overlaid with a healthy dose of irreverence.
Strangeness and illogicality are essential to Japanese culture and storytelling, and therefore, alongside all the ritual and reverence, Japan has perfected the art of questioning the norm – if not discarding it entirely – which is arguably what enables creative evolution.
Surely there is much to learn from this? Perhaps everything doesn’t have to conform to a prescribed notion of what’s appropriate, with the exception of the basics of form and function, the bedrock of anything we might consider “good” design.
As Pico Iyer writes in his book A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, “The mind says either/or. The spirit embraces both.” And Japan is all the richer for it, on every level. I’m already planning my next visit.
Michelle Ogundehin is a thought leader on interiors, trends, style and wellbeing. Originally trained as an architect and the former editor-in-chief of ELLE Decoration UK, she is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters, and the author of Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness, a guide to living well. She is also a regular contributor to publications including Vogue Living, FT How to Spend It magazine and Dezeen.
The photo is by Prince Wei.
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